It was a chilly early fall day when we reached Lublin, Poland. The lights were shining brightly across an expansive park when our comfortable bus reached the empty parking lot of the CONCENTRATION CAMP.
The rest of our group filed off, but I hung around. I took off my coat, a dress shirt, and undershirt and walked down the steps to feel the cold afternoon air on my bare chest. I put the shirt back on and walked into Majdanek, one of several killing factories in Germany and Poland where the Nazis were murdering Jews and other unworthies with the efficiency of a Volkswagen industrial plant.
Tuesday was the 80th anniversary of American soldiers liberating Auschwitz. My memories return of walking through its smaller cousin, Majdanek, sitting across from the quiet park in the town of Lublin.
I looked at the registry at the entrance and then walked by the double deck bunks. From there it was a short walk across the hall to the furnaces. The Nazis didn’t want to waste space. I had dreamt of this moment since I was a teenager in Chicago after watching movies and a TV series about the Holocaust.
And there it was–floors clean, ovens side by side and compact. Unimaginable, yet there I was, with other Jewish tourists, on a detour from a business trip, in the nondescript killing factory next to a pleasant quiet city park.
The visit was 25 years ago, 55 years after Majdanek had been liberated and the ragged survivors were welcomed into first aid tents. Today, some of their great-grandchildren are hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza. More innocent Jews were massacred at the music festival in the Negev Desert in Israel on October 7, 2023. This week, an Israeli Government Minister was held back from a European meeting in Brussels, Belgium, for fear of being attacked.
A picture of one of the few living survivors of Auschwitz, dressed in concentration camp blue stripes, was on the cover of Tuesday’s Wall Street journal. I’ll never forget that day in Majdanek, walking past the ovens and imagining the horrible shrieks in my ears.
